Perhaps, the easiest way to ‘remember’ all your passwords is to use password manager software like RoboForm. Alternatively, the built-in password manager in most browsers should suffice most for most people.

However if you are after something more natural that involves the use of your memory, here are some tips to help you out.

Using your memory has its advantage in that you can still login to any website even from a computer that doesn’t have access to your password manager data.

The following are five quick tips to help you create a secure and easy to remember password. Most of the tricks involved coming up with a general rule and use it to generate a password that appears to be random.

In case you don’t know about this already, Alexa has released a toolbar for Firefox. What this means is that more Firefox users can now be counted towards a site’s overall Alexa ranking. This will effectively improves the accuracy of the Alexa ranking as more Firefox users decide to install the toolbar.

Previously, the official Alexa toolbar only exists for Internet Explorer.

Once installed, the toolbar sits quietly in your browser status bar at the bottom right showing a site traffic trend, reach meter and traffic rank. In addition, a new related links menu is added to your browser menu bar.

I feel the traffic trend information is too small to be useful. Unless I can see how a site traffic trend compares to others, I might as well visit Alexa to view and compare traffic trends. Read more...

Here’s another cool tip for Firefox I came across recently. If you have a favourite website where you search frequently, a feature called Smart Keywords will let you search that website right from the Location bar.

Let say you are always curious to know any blog’s Technorati ranking and you visit Technorati.com all the time to do the search. Normally, you go to Technorati.com and click in the search box and enter domain name and click Search .

Smart keyword will make these steps redundant. To create a Smart Keyword for Technorati.com, visit their page and right click on the search field.

Choose Add a Keyword for this Search… The Add Bookmark dialog will appear. Enter a name for the Bookmark, e.g. “Technorati”, and give it a keyword, e.g. “tc” and save the bookmark.

If you’ve been spending time on the Internet for any amount of time, I am sure you have a handful websites or blogs that you visit daily for a dose of information or inspiration. For most people, typing the domain name in the address bar or lunging for the mouse to access the bookmarked site would be the routine.

Those who are a fan of keyboard shortcuts will be happy to know that you can actually access your bookmarks faster using a nifty feature in Firefox which allows you to give a bookmark a shortcut.

Even if you are not a fan of keyboard shortcuts, this feature will save you a lot of time daily. I’ve been using it for a couple a days, and I am completely hooked.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you are an avid reader of Sabahan.com, ahem…, and it’s one of the first sites you visit when you launch your browser. Read more...

RedFly Marketing has released a Firefox extension that let you see what searchers in other countries are seeing for a particular search.

You can also use it to compare organic search results in different countries or if you want to see how your AdWords PPC campaigns appear in different regions.

Previously, I’ve been manually appending &gl=country to the query string in my search URL to view the search results in a particular country. For example, if I want to see who are paying for the keyword “free stuff” in the US, I constructed the following:

Like most software, you can access all of Mozilla Firefox features via the menu bar or the in context popup menu with your mouse.

However, sometimes using a mouse actually slows you down. The precious seconds it takes to move you hand away to move you mouse can add up over the course of a full day. You can save time and avoid reaching for the mouse if you are familiar with keyboard shortcuts.

The following keyboard shortcuts will make web browsing with Firefox even more fun and productive.

Access Your Favorite Websites Quickly

If you have been typing the http://www prefix and .com domain extension into your browser address all this while when trying to access a website, you can avoid this extra step by going to your address bar, then type the middle portion of the desired address, and press CTRL+Enter

As an example, if you type “sabahan” and press CTRL+Enter, you will land on http://www.sabahan.com

In addition, you can press SHIFT+Enter to go to a .net site and CTRL+SHIFT+Enter to a .org site.

I upgraded my operating system to Windows Vista Ultimate a few days ago without having to wipe Windows XP from my hard disk. It involved installing Vista on a separate partition in my hard disk so that I can still run Windows XP anytime I like.

By doing so, I’ll have an OS to fall back to in case my Windows Vista installation goes horribly wrong. But I didn’t have a choice, I would have to make Vista works and I am glad it did.

This method works if you have a PC running Windows XP and you want to install Windows Vista from its installation DVD to have both OS dual boot.

For those who don’t know, dual boot is the ability to boot your computer using one of two different operating systems.

A few months after I wrote about my intention here and here to upgrade my operating system to Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows Vista, I finally did it on Saturday last weekend.

I managed to grab an OEM copy for RM680 after shopping around at Karamunsing Complex in Kota Kinabalu.

Getting Ready For Vista

I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor, an application that helps Windows XP users identify which edition of Vista meets their needs and whether their PCs are ready for an upgrade and I passed with flying colours.

Vista Upgrade Advisor recommended Windows Vista Business edition but I thought I could benefit from the extra features offered by Vista Ultimate so I bought that edition instead.

If your PC is less than two years old, chances are good that you can run Windows Vista. I bought mine in October 2004, so it’s just over two years old but I still manage to run Vista without much hiccups. Read more...

The more I read about Windows Vista, the more tempted I become to upgrade my Windows XP to the latest release from Microsoft as soon as possible.

I decide to upgrade not because I can afford to or because I have a Vista Premium Ready PC but because I need to. As a software developer for the Windows platform, there’s no escaping for me to ensure that my software are compatible with the latest OS in the market.

I was asked several times by my customers if my software is compatible with Vista . While I expect them run without problem, the only way for me to know for sure is to test them on Vista myself

However, instead of replacing my Windows XP installation, I am considering to install Vista on a separate partition allowing both Vista and XP to coexist. This setup will allow me to select which OS to run while the PC is booting. Read more...